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Doing so would fundamentally change the Erlang abstract machine in ways that would impact the rest of the system. In particular, Erlang has a notion of selective receive as a core part of the language (which is necessary for things like two-phase locking, which can't be expressed natively in the actor model without it).
Selective receive means that waking up an actor that has a full message queue will not automatically result in its message queue shrinking in size.
Some background:
In Verona, we have a generalisation of the actor model, which makes things like two-phase commit easy but makes this problem worse: the equivalent of a message is 'sent' to multiple concurrent owners (generalised actors), so working out who to wake to reduce the total number of messages in the system is hard.
We looked at what a version for embedded devices would look like, but even the actor-model subset is basically impossible. Even simple actor model has things with fan-out, so waking up an actor because its queue is full may cause two more messages to be sent. And these may be in cycles.
And actor model (and BoC) don't provide good tools for reasoning about the worst-case numbers.
@david_chisnall @whitequark reminds me of molecular computing and the join calculus
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